Perspectives: Public Housing; Seeking to Improve Quality in Shelter

REMEMBER the principle of economic mix in the tenancy, say the managers of large publicly assisted housing developments. It is one of the keys to success in providing decent housing to lower-income people over time.

The theme has been sounded again of late by Sally Hernandez-Pinero, chairwoman of the New York City Housing Authority for the last 10 months. "New York is working hard at keeping to the one-third, one-third, one-third mix on admissions," she said. She defined that in general terms as one-third elderly, one-third working families and one-third publicly assisted families.

Many pressures work against this effort. Some come from the state level. The situation takes on special significance at a time when the incoming Clinton Administration is likely to give a new look to housing policy and the way it is implemented at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington.

The ability to sustain a desirable economic and social mix of tenants is one of the keys to the long-term quality of publicly assisted housing, housing managers say. There are others that also involve Washington's policies: adequate operating subsidies to compensate for declining rents; a reasonable amount of new production to ease the pressure on admissions; rules that give flexibility to competent local managements.

Quality, oddly enough, has gotten short shrift in recent years. In Washington the political pressures from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum threaten to push public housing heavily into the position of houser of very-low-income tenants only. Last year the Housing and Community Development Act attempted to reverse this trend by giving local authorities more discretion to achieve a diverse population.

In New York City, court rulings that effectively require local government to provide permanent housing to homeless people on demand have also had the effect of increasing the proportion of the dependent families in assisted housing generally.

The question is, will H.U.D. in the Democratic Administration start working collaboratively with local managements? Or will ideological issues continue to draw attention from the need to improve the quality of shelter?

The economic and social mix issue will be one test. Many public housing officials feel that in the 1980's the Department of Housing and Urban Development viewed public housing too exclusively as a preserve for the most disadvantaged tenants. At the same time, many advocates for the homeless were driving a Federal response that made the policy a reality.

Seven years ago, 35 percent of the new admissions to public housing in New York City were from the neediest segment of the population, with income from public assistance programs only. By last year this component, called Tier 1 by the Housing Authority, had reached 53 percent, roughly half the 4,000 new admissions each year.

Partly this was the result of Federal admissions standards under a five-year-old admissions preference program. Starting in 1987, housing agencies had to give preference on their waiting lists to people who are involuntarily displaced, people who live in substandard housing and people who pay more than 50 percent of their income for rent. By accelerating these families on waiting lists, new admissions have been weighted toward the lowest-income applicants.

DURING most of the 80's, 90 percent of new admissions had to meet these preference standards. Under the 1992 housing act, Congress authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to allow local housing agencies to adopt local standards for as much as 50 percent of new admissions. Once implemented this could lead to better economic and social balance in new admissions.

Meanwhile, public housing in New York has grown less attractive to many eligible working people, and certificates and vouchers have helped make alternatives feasible. These working families are defined as low income because they earn between 50 to 80 percent of areawide median income, or roughly $20,000 a year for a family of four. Currently they constitute only 16 to 18 percent of the total waiting list, the Housing Authority says. About 11 percent of new admissions are working families from this income tier. A typical household profile is a working mother with one or two children, earning about $15,500 a year.

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The failure of Congress to make economic mix a consistent goal of housing policy has contributed to the problem nationally, many specialists agree. But the solution hardly lies in Washington exclusively. By agreeing to provide emergency shelter some years ago to any family on public assistance who requested it, New York City has found itself overwhelmed with demand for permanent housing from a heavy flow of families moving into limited but improved transitional housing facilities. Much of the rehousing burden has fallen on public housing, which also seeks to place young families doubled up within its own buildings.

In the last four years 25 percent of all new admissions to public housing were from the homeless population in transitional housing. In August the authority and the office of Mayor David N. Dinkins agreed that the authority would accept an annual allocation of only 1,670 homeless families, which would be 20 percent of total annual admissions.

On the production side, Ms. Hernandez-Pinero said she has no desire to move back to the days of large new housing projects. Instead she wants to use production allocation for renovating buildings supplied from the tax-foreclosed city-owned housing stock, or buying existing new but untenanted privately developed buildings, or acquiring housing units within developments produced under the New York Housing Partnership program of for-sale homes or the low-income buildings developed with tax-credit financing by the Local Initiative Support Corporation and the Enterprise Foundation.

Quality comes into play here as well. The most desirable new developments have turned out to be gut rehabilitations, built internally to Federal standards, of handsome older apartment buildings acquired from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development's tax-foreclosed housing stock.

The Housing Authority also hopes to be able to get HUD's permission to acquire newly developed privately owned buildings for public-housing tenants, said Deborah Wright, a board member who oversees development. "We've been made aware of buildings in Queens and Staten Island that were built for the market and then the market collapsed," she said. Buying them would be cheaper than building them.

That is the type of activity that has been difficult to carry out under Washington's thumb. Accordingly, the Housing Authority seeks more independence of action.

The Housing Authority runs about 180,000 apartments in public-housing developments. It also gets 61,000 certificates or vouchers that are issued to low-income housing seekers looking for apartments in privately owned buildings. In New York City in particular, with its huge housing stock and a large population unable to afford the rent necessary to sustain that housing, these Federal subsidies under the Section 8 program have proved particularly valuable.

Vouchers are more flexible than certificates, in that they allow tenants to pay more than 30 percent of their income as rent and are usually more "portable" than certificates because they are always issued to a tenant rather than a building. In both cases the Government makes up the difference between what the tenant can afford and what it calls the "fair market rent," the rent required for operation.

"WE have no problem issuing certificates and vouchers," said John Nelson, general manager of the Housing Authority. "We get about 1,000 new ones each year." The fact that tenants want them and find them usable suggests that this mechanism of serving the housing needs of lower-income people has been a success in New York. If the tenant cannot find a suitable apartment within 60 days, the certificate or voucher must be returned.

Another area in which public-housing advocates hope for a change in policy by the Clinton Administration is Federal spending on modernization of existing buildings. Programs to stimulate the economy, they say, could lead to an increase in spending over the $3.1. billion that Congress aleady appropriated for fiscal 1993, according to Maryann Russ, executive director of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities. In fiscal 1992 H.U.D. spent $2.5 billion.

"Money put into public housing modernization will create a lot of jobs," Ms. Russ said.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 13, 1992, on Page 10010003 of the National edition with the headline: Perspectives: Public Housing; Seeking to Improve Quality in Shelter. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe